Ambient music radio program on Radio Spiral and LiveStream. Hosted by Rebekkah Hilgraves, Saturdays from 1-4pm Pacific Time/US.

November 8, 2014August 19, 2015

Wings, Feathers, Scales, Fur, Fins, Tails

All about critters on this week’s edition of At Water’s Edge: some new tracks, some old tracks, and we run the gamut of sounds from experimental to highly lyrical and everything in between. We feature stunning nature images from Faery Dust in the video program.

Many of the sounds on Bestiary come from the MOTM modular synthesizer by Synthesis Technology. The album actually started with the intention of making a second ACID loop library for Sonic Foundry, following Liquid Planet. I started developing a library of extreme analog sounds, which could only have come from a modular synth. As the synth began to grow, I became more enchanted by the range of timbres it could produce. It sounded so much better than the modular synth that I had built back in the seventies, yet the working method was still visceral and familiar. At a certain point I decided that these new sounds should form the backbone of my next solo album, so I stopped working on the ACID loop concept and began structuring the sounds into compositions.

These tracks, along with “The Foggy Dew” (wh092) started as lucky byproducts of sound experiments for Djinnestan. The resulting recordings were something I found myself repeatedly going back and listening to. I feel they are a pleasure in their own right and don’t need to be the underlayer of something else.

Loren Nerell’s dark and humid soundscape releases date back to his 1996 release LILIN DEWA, as well as the more recent INDONESIAN SOUNDSCAPES. TAKSU takes cues from both of these albums, blending environmental sounds he records during his Indonesian travels, and Balinese instruments together.

The crowning touch on this project came from Steve Roach, stalwart ambient music pioneer and long-time friend of Loren’s, who came in to provide the final spatial treatments and CD mastering.

“if you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing” – Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt (unreleased, 2014) *written specifically for this episode!*

Written for this program, and also included in a brand new video to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down (see the video here), this track includes sounds of birds, bells, guitar and his neighbour’s vegan (!) cats.